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Node.js, WordPress Core

Modifying core WordPress files is a quick way to introduce security vulnerabilities, break your site, and break future updates. From the perspective of a developer, nothing is worse than searching through a theme and plugins for a problem only to discover a previous developer modified a core WordPress file an introduced a bug.

I wrote a simple Node module that lets you easily check WordPress installations for modified or removed core files. Install the detect-wp-core-modifications npm package with the following shell command:

npm install -g detect-wp-core-modifications

You can run the command without any arguments from within the root of a WordPress installation with the following shell
command:

detect-wp-core-modifications

You can also specify a relative or absolute path to a WordPress installation:

detect-wp-core-modifications ../wordpress
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Publishing Experience, WordPress Core, WordPress Plugins

Given the unmet need to allow users only access to edit specific pieces of content, I created a simple plugin called Editorial Access Manager.

By default in WordPress, we can create users and assign them to roles. Roles are automatically assigned certain capabilities. However, sometimes default roles are not enough, and we have one-off situations. Editorial Access Manager lets you set which users or roles have access to specific posts (as well as pages and custom post types).

Only the Administrator and Editor role have access to manage pages by default in WordPress. Making a user an Editor gives them a lot of power. I ran into the situation where we wanted a Contributor (less power than an Editor) to be able to edit only a few pages hence the need for this plugin.

My plan is to eventually integrate this plugin with EditFlow allowing people to assign User Groups to have access to specific pieces of content.

Any development help on this project would be much appreciated! Fork the Github repo.

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WordPress Plugins

For the past year or so I’ve been using Automattic’s Syndication plugin to pull feed content into my WordPress plugin. Feeds that I designate are pulled in as posts using WordPress Cron. I decided while the plugin worked well for the most part, it wasn’t quite meeting my needs. This prompted me to build a new plugin called Feed Pull.

Here are some differences between the two plugins:

  • Feed Pull is a plugin for pulling content out of XML feeds. Syndication has feed pulling as well as content pushing features.
  • Feed Pull has a much friendlier feed management screen. Both Syndication and Feed Pull use the WordPress post edit, screen, however Feed Pull offers a much cleaner experience from the way options are presented to the instructions provided. At the moment Feed Pull does not have all the features of Syndication such as taxonomy and constant field mapping. However, Feed Pull probably has everything you need and is very extensible.
  • Feed Pull has far superior error logging to Syndication.
  • Feed Pull allows you to schedule content pulling in the future.
  • Feed Pull allows you to do manual pulls using AJAX rather than a sometimes frustrating one-time cron job.

Feed Pull contributions are always welcome on Github.

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WordPress Core, WordPress Plugins

10up just released a new plugin called the Post Customizer. I, along with John James Jacoby, John Bloch, Drew Jaynes, and Carl Danley led the charge on the plugin. The idea of the plugin is to mimic the theme customizer for posts. The plugin adds functionality that displays an overlay when you click “Preview” within the post editor. The overlay has a sidebar allowing you to edit the excerpt and featured post. In the middle of the overlay is a frame that shows the front of the website. Within that frame you can edit the post title and content. This enables you to make “live” changes and to see how they look as you make them. There are other plugins that offer similar behavior. However, Post Customizer closely follows the Theme Customizer and thus WordPress standards.

We want to make this plugin super extensible, and we need all the help we can get. We would appreciate contributions! Fork the plugin on Github.

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WordPress Plugins

Hey Everyone!

I wanted to let everyone know about a new WordPress plugin called Safe Redirect Manager. I am one of the main developers of this plugin, and it has just been released on WordPress.org along with WordPress.com VIP (which is quite a special honor).

So what is the difference between this plugin and all the other redirect management plugins? Well, this plugin is simple, safe, and straight to the point. Instead of using the WordPress options table to store redirects, it uses a custom post type; this is much more flexible and lighter on your server. The plugin has been tested and reviewed by multiple WordPress core contributors and is available on WordPress.com — in order for a plugin to be available on WordPress.com it must be extremely secure. Safe Redirect Manager also allows you to use regular expressions in your redirects (if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry it’s an optional feature).

Download here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/safe-redirect-manager

P.S: If you are a developer, Safe Redirect Manager is available to be forked on Github.

Edit: Thank you Branco Radenovich for the Slovak translation. This will be included in version 1.6.1 of the plugin.

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